Requirements management challenges solved

“Analysts report that as many as 71% of software projects that fail do so because of poor requirements management, making it the single biggest reason for project failure – bigger than bad technology, missed deadlines or change management fiascoes.” – Christopher Lindquist, Fixing the Requirements Mess, CIO Magazine

Many innovations can be born by simply putting a solid requirements management process in place. With this in mind, OneDesk’s requirements and analysis applications were designed to help you tackle the challenges brought on by these essential processes. Let’s take a look at how:

Challenge #1: Unclear requirements

Unclear requirements are more problematic than they most people think. They can lead to a complete roadblock, or even to a project disaster. Unclear requirements cause companies to lose a lot of time as they often must start over and try to understand them again. This leads to financial difficulties, which makes it hard to move forward with the project.

How OneDesk helps: Generate product requirements from ideas, issues, help desk tickets, feedback, and questions, or link items to requirements. This way, requirements are always traceable and no one will spend time understanding why they exist.

Challenge #2: Changing requirements

One common characteristic of requirements is that they are constantly evolving, especially with the nature of today market demands. This brings on the challenge of constantly needing to track and stay updated on each requirement, as well as keep the entire organization informed.

Requirements change for three main reasons:

Lack of understanding of the requirement
Defects are identified
Requirements are overlooked and missed

How OneDesk helps: OneDesk helps your company develop a more Agile way of managing requirements. Instead of investing time creating detailed requirements documents that will need to be changed several times, all information can be stored in one central place, and all changes to its dependencies will automatically be reflected. Furthermore, issues can be created directly from requirements and not break the workflow.

Challenge #3: Requirements definition

Requirements definition often requires the use of specialized software to gather all the requirements and document information about each one, create dependencies, stay updated on each requirement’s status, and analyze them.

How OneDesk helps: OneDesk has all the characteristics of requirement definition software. You can gather requirements by manually entering them into the requirements application, or create them from feedback. Then, link them to issues, tasks and organizational goals. Assign them to team members, and finally, analyze and prioritize them using the requirements analysis tool.

Challenge #4: Requirements prioritization

When there is a long list of requirements (that keep changing), it can be challenging to know which ones are worth implementing, and which ones should be handled first.

How OneDesk helps: OneDesk’s requirements analysis tool allows you to analyze requirements based on what’s important to your company. Requirements are analyzed based on your organization’s strategies, on how many customers they would satisfy, by popularity, or by how much profit your company would make by implementing them. Just tell the system what your priorities are and automatically see the results.

We want to know: What challenges do you face when it comes to requirements management, and how do you solve them?